Category: Chatoyant College Book 12: Reemergence

Corrie could tell that Annie looked unhappy as they headed toward the cafeteria—she didn’t feel entirely happy herself—so she made a point of mentioning that she had left Edie a note. She also tried to look around surreptitiously when they left Gilkey, but she didn’t see any sign of Edie or Leila.

Annie and Corrie both cheered up once they started eating their food, but Roe still seemed grumpy, staring down at her eggs and not talking much. Corrie tried to involve her in the conversation, and finally came out and asked, “Roe, what’s wrong? If you were just up late last night, I’ll stop bugging you.”

“I was up kind of late, but that’s not the problem,” Roe said. She pushed her hair back out of her face and sighed. “I had a weird dream last night.”

Corrie, balancing her keys in one hand and her shower tote with her towel in the other (she’d wrapped the towel around her head as she always did when done with her shower, but it seemed to be unbalanced today and was tipping to the side), managed to get the door of her dorm room unlocked. The light was on, and when she stepped inside she looked around, expecting to see Edie, but no one was there.

She might have been in the bathroom herself, but Corrie hadn’t thought there was anyone else there when she left. And she had a strange feeling that Edie had gone somewhere else.

“I’m sure he’s fine,” Corrie said, trying to soothe Roe’s worries. “He can take care of himself, right? The Djanaea have their own magic.”

She actually wasn’t sure whether Link could hold his own against any faeries who decided to give him trouble. But there had to be something he could do. It would be ridiculous to send someone with no more power than an ordinary human to talk to faeries like Mardalan.

“Yeah, I guess,” Roe said with a shrug and a twist of her mouth to the side. “But it’s mostly illusion magic, and he doesn’t want to hide himself from the faeries, since he has to talk to them. So I don’t know if it will keep him safe.”

Roe insisted on carrying the bag of food as they all walked back to the building, and since splitting it up would have meant the food would cool off faster, Corrie didn’t argue. Anyway, arguing would have taken more time, and now that the sun was down, the evening was cooling quickly. Corrie wanted to get back inside.

She even sped up as they approached Gilkey so she would be the first to reach the door, where she swiped her ID and held the door open for the other three. That meant she missed the beginning of a conversation, but she heard Roe’s response to what seemed to be a question Annie had asked.

“He has some important business to do tonight,” she was saying. “I don’t know why it had to be now, but I wasn’t going to argue too much. I have him almost every Saturday night, so it would be selfish of me to complain.”

Corrie was glad that her friends had joined her; it was a pretty nice night, and the sun was still out, but the bright colors of the sunset slowly creeping across the sky still gave her a nervous feeling. Maybe it was that Leila had returned, and now she didn’t know what would happen next. Or maybe it was just that the faerie influence she had learned to mostly understand over the last few months had suddenly gone away.

The gate was still open and there was no sign of a delivery vehicle, so they stood next to one side of the gate, waiting for their delivery. Remembering what Edie had said about Leila getting in through the gate, Corrie felt in her pockets for a four-leaf clover, but she must have left them in her other coat. It didn’t matter, anyway; she wasn’t going to sit down and go into trance right now, and that was the only way she could see the barrier.

Corrie tried to be open to conversation, but Edie didn’t say anything about Leila for the rest of the day, though she did keep looking out the window. Corrie didn’t want to bring the subject back up herself. She did wonder where Leila had gone after she talked to Edie, but she was confident that the faerie could take care of herself.

They passed a pretty quiet day, working on their homework and snacking throughout the day because neither of them felt like going out to the dining hall for lunch. Corrie didn’t want to leave Edie alone—and it was also nice to just hang out in the room all day with her roommate and best friend.

As the day wore on toward evening, though, Corrie started to get sick of homework. She’d caught up with her math and art homework and done the introductory and closing paragraphs of her essay for her English class; she knew she should practice trance, but now that she was getting bored, she didn’t think she would do very well.